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automotive

Ford Lobbies For Pickup Truck Emoji

Ford is petitioning the Unicode Consortium to add a pickup truck emoji to the approved list of icons.

Following months of “top-secret development and testing,” the all-new
pickup truck emoji is short-listed as a candidate for inclusion in the next emoji update planned for early 2020, according to the automaker, which announced the news on World Emoji Day.

The concept emoji’s styling has been tuned to meet current trends and will not show a Ford badge, so Chevrolet, Ram and other pickup truck owners can also enjoy it, says Matthew VanDyke,
director of U.S. marketing.

“We designed the emoji to be nameplate-agnostic,” VanDyke tells Marketing Daily. “We wanted an emoji that represented pick-up trucks of all
kinds -- in the spirit of unification.”

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If the pickup truck emoji is approved in early 2020, the design will be customized for all mobile platforms. The automaker created an online
teaser video via WPP agency partners.

Ford decided to take the initiative as a result of consumer requests, VanDyke says.

“We heard a lot of chatter on social media, including
even from Dwayne, The Rock, Johnson, who tweeted about it not once, but seven times,” he says. “These very public expressions of discontent [that there was no emoji] got us motivated to do
something about it.”

The automaker felt it was its “duty” to usher in the pickup truck emoji.

“Some may wonder why Ford wanted to create a truck emoji,”
VanDyke says. “The answer is simple: we have more than 100 years of truck heritage. Notwithstanding, trucks have long been used as a tool for productivity and we believe by bringing
a shorthand version to mobile devices, we’re extending the productivity potential of trucks globally -- in a virtual sense, of course.”

“I always look for projects that are multidimensional, but this was a first,” Cranston tells Marketing Daily via email.
“Ford engineers are going crazy trying to figure out how to match the real truck’s gas mileage with the emoji’s! That’ll keep them busy.”